


walk beside me, walk on by

by pineovercoat



Category: Red White & Royal Blue - Casey McQuiston
Genre: Canon Compliant, Character Study, Classical References, Innuendo, Internal Monologue, Introspection, M/M, Missing Scene
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-08
Updated: 2021-02-08
Packaged: 2021-03-13 09:48:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,893
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29276451
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pineovercoat/pseuds/pineovercoat
Summary: He has been here before. He has walked away from this before, too.
Relationships: Alex Claremont-Diaz/Henry Fox-Mountchristen-Windsor
Comments: 8
Kudos: 11
Collections: Chocolate Box - Round 6





	walk beside me, walk on by

**Author's Note:**

  * For [plumeria47](https://archiveofourown.org/users/plumeria47/gifts).



> thank you for the prompt! they were all so sweet, but I was so drawn to the idea of Henry's end of things after that New Year's/the State Dinner. I hope you enjoy!!  I didn't manage to get this britpicked but hopefully nothing is too jarring. 🙏
> 
> in the spirit but not the letter of all things henry, the end notes contain a _very_ informal bibliography of lit and poetry which henry references in his internal monologue- credit where it's due!!

The door swings open for Henry, a young man of twenty-two, no one in particular but a lover. There is a kiss on his lips. His skin is alight. 

The door clicks shut behind Henry, Prince of England. 

He has been here before. He has walked away from this before, too. Thresholds are funny things, as are second chances. 

_You can kiss me good-night._

His breath catches. He steadies himself. He does not linger; he will no doubt return in his thoughts, if he leaves at all.

There is nothing for it but take one step, and then another. His feet can be trusted to carry him, he knows; they’ve supported his weight on the many, many walks he’s taken away from the things he’s wanted most. This time is no different. Should be no different. 

But, strangely enough, it is.

There’s something in this silence, a dissonance both anticipatory and ultimate, like some orchestral score should be feeding in from invisible speakers and at any moment the credits will start rolling over his life. It feels mythical. It feels mundane. It's all wrong. There should be more hubris, he thinks. More tragedy. He is Paris; he is Cassandra; he is at once Laocoön and the men of Troy, at odds over the heart of their mutual destruction. Are there snakes in the Potomac? They could do him a good turn and rise to devour him now. 

_Don’t freak out_ , he reminds himself. To his consternation, his mind supplies the dressing down in Alex's voice. Below his rumpled collar and at the height of his cheeks, his skin betrays him, a confession in rose. Good thing anyone who might see the state of him as he leaves the Residence has already signed all the paperwork which helpfully informs them that no, they did not _._ The irrepressible glow is all over him; curiosity killed the cat, but oh, the satisfaction, glutted on that voice in his ears, the noise of his blood, and the tide of his measured breath—

And then, the _sight_ of him, the images which will stay with Henry forever, at the back of his mind and his dreams and a light in the darkness when he closes his eyes: insouciant curls and a smile to match them, skin dewy with the sweat of exertion, the freckle exposed by rumpled sheets pulling away from the very juncture where his mouth had- 

He nearly loses his footing on the stairs.

The taciturn secret service agent from earlier- Amy, if he recalls- pointedly does not look up as he passes, though he knows she only allows him the fiction of her indifference and, in turn, his own dignity; he makes a mental note to send her something for the caritas all the same. Perhaps something that can function as an ongoing apology for his existence.

...will it be ongoing? His heart flips in his chest, leaps and bounds ahead of him, as always. Will he walk away from a bedroom like this, again and again and again- the grudging exhale after such desperate, gasping pulls of air? And on the other side of it, will there be another open door, and Alex and the inhale beyond it, a blessing to a man drowning, no, to a man on fire-

Henry is most assuredly not freaking out. He does not freak out as he goes through the necessary banalities with his own security detail, or in all the short distance to the Blair House, or when the door to his own room snaps shut behind him like punctuation at the end of a sentence. If throwing his phone on silent and into the dresser drawer before he so much as removes his shoes is freaking out, he thinks that much, at least, is justified.

He thinks, with all the wearied resignation in him, that he really should have known better than to expect peace in a month named for Janus. Or to expect peace at all in the orbit of one Alex Claremont-Diaz, who curses when he lifts the hair from Henry’s eyes and calls him sweetheart even as he grips the back of his neck steady. _Sweetheart_. The heat it invokes is enough to make him forget the mid-Atlantic winter, and oh, what freezings he has felt, what dark days seen, what old December’s bareness. He’s not so sure he can survive whatever it is that spring will inspire. His fingers twitch for the phone he rid himself of moments earlier, determined to pin down some inflexible excuse to be nowhere near the District of Columbia’s Tidal Basin in early April, if only not to feel so exposed. It’s no good, because he remembers the exhibition match in Greenwich with all the fervor of the fanatical, and he has to shove his hands beneath the pillow and put all the weight of his thoughts on them to keep them from doing something rash. 

There’s some unspoken rule about texting. Three days in the dark, if he recalls correctly. Like Christ. A hysterical little laugh almost shakes loose from his throat; if only he could be dead for the duration. How did he manage _weeks_? How will he manage them now that he knows the weight of Alex above him, holding him down, holding him together? He’ll need a new categorization, he muses distantly- a new way of understanding his history. Before Alex, and After Alex, though it isn’t as clean as all that. The whole sorry mess is completely snarled; it will be a job to untangle.

What would he say, regardless? _I had a nice time, and I was thinking maybe you and I can adjoin our bedrooms like Villiers and IV & I?_ or _You said we can do this again- can I take back what I said about not going in for a second round- I think I’d rather not be thinking right now, actually?_ or _I carried that kiss with me from the garden on New Year’s. It put down roots in the cold, without light, without sun, without hope. It grew, though I tried to kill it. I’m not certain I should be telling you this, but I am not sorry._

It’s only an invitation. It shouldn’t be this dramatic.

Tomorrow, he decides. Today has taken enough years off his life. Tomorrow he can screw his courage to the- _ah_. He shifts, grimacing a little as he curls on himself. He should probably shower, though he’s not quite ready to wash the night out of his hair. 

At a loss, he takes stock of the wreck Alex has made of him. A finger grazed a button there. A curse and a prayer touched his skin here. Lips met his, wanting. And _here_ , half-hidden and coy, like clever brown eyes beneath the fall of eyelashes- he stutters to a stop. His eyes squeeze shut. 

There is a mark below his ear, a flower in full bloom. 

It’s still there days later, in solidarity with the unsent invitation, hiding under carefully set concealer in a way that feels too much like artless metaphor for Henry’s liking. Over the intervening nights he finds himself pressing his fingers and his thoughts against them both, and he aches. How do people do this? How do they manage this- couching their feelings in deflections and gesture, tiptoeing around what it is they truly want? Like he already does, he supposes wearily. Day in and day out. A little harder when you’ve held it in your arms, though, when you bear its mark on your skin. 

Stupidly, recklessly, he wishes it could last forever. It’s far too sentimental a thought to be having over an assignation- his shoulders reach his ears with the speed and power of complete and total mortification with himself, an assignation, _really?_ \- over _whatever this is_. Despite his attempts at course correction, the notion still veers dangerously close to the romantic, and he's already stretched his luck so far to have had this- to have Alex to want him in the same way he has wanted Alex. 

So he had some hope, maybe, on the receiving end of all those texts and calls he left unanswered- surely Alex wouldn’t have kept trying to reach out if his sole goal was murder (or worse: a gentle letdown), not unless arranging a date and time was that critical, they are both busy people after all- but in the wake of December, he could never have anticipated _this_. Alex hadn’t waited three days. He hadn’t even waited until three post meridiem to send him a text so charming and filthy it had him tripping over his feet, his tongue, entire continents, _multum ille et terris iactatus et alto,_ his metered composure slipping when it should be practiced, confident. 

Still- it would have been the perfect bow on a perfect disaster. Poetic, even, to have the chapter definitively titled _Alex_ close in the early hours of New Year’s Day. That should have been the end of that- no different than an appearance, a dinner, a contractual obligation. But it was more than that, at least on his end. 

It’s more than what he’s pretending it is, even now, even when he answers Alex’s aimless provocations with his own and does not tell him anything dangerous about gardens or marks or Connecticut. 

The thing is, it always has been. 

It scares him.

His parents had had romance. It doesn’t take much divining to find his fate in theirs, laid out as tidily as lines in the pages of a storybook. He will be like his mother, trapped in a tower by a dragon of his own making. It’s a monstrous thing, regret- it only ever grows, and it feeds on everything. Distance has never loosened the white-knuckled grip of his heart- not with miles, not with time, not even in death, and there is a part of his mind that turns and turns and turns, reinventing the wheel and breaking him upon it, bringing these old griefs to bear, crushing him under the weight of himself. It is ceaseless- but then there is Alex, and the ease with which he shakes him out of himself, bold and confident in his own bed, brilliant and cutting in text, or barefoot in Henry’s kitchen, his glasses skewed, unable to suppress a surprised smile-

_You are being daft,_ Henry tells himself, after a little more than a week of agony _. Everything about this is impossible._ Even if it becomes real one day, stops being a _this_ and becomes something he can name, it will still be impossible. The compass rose lingering over his throat makes a compelling counterargument: _true north is somewhere across the Atlantic right now, texting you because coursework is not nearly as entertaining as driving you to distraction, and you can ride out to meet it._ But this is not the sort of path that ends with a dance in a museum chapel; hadn’t Alex had said so himself? No, this can only end in flames. 

No matter. Lying to oneself is in the blood, easy as leaving a room or closing a drawer. What is a Great Fire, then? He can enjoy the heat for what it is, at least.

He calls Alex about Greenwich, and convinces himself that he did not throw down the spark.  
  


**Author's Note:**

> i don't have a degree in this like henry but i did take one entire class on poetry in college and i'm ready to pretend i know anything (I don't)!! first up: title is paraphased from modern love by david bowie. shoutout to david the dog 
> 
> - _and oh, what freezings he has felt, what dark days seen, what old December’s bareness_ \- paraphrased from Sonnet 97: "How like a winter hath my absence been", Shakespeare
> 
> -AMOR CONDUSSE NOI AD UNA MORTE - Xavier Villaurrutia. The title itself comes from the Divine Comedy (love has conducted us unto one death).
> 
> Lines in particular, and translated by Rachel Benson:  
>  _Amar es escuchar sobre tu pecho/To love is to listen at your breast  
>  hasta colmar la oreja codiciosa/until my greedy ear is glutted  
> el rumor de tu sangre y la marea/to the noise of your blood and the tide  
> de tu respiración acompasada./of your measured breath._
> 
> - _'whatever it is that spring will inspire ... if only not to feel so exposed.'_ referencing Neruda, 'Juegas Todos los Días (Every Day You Play)' together with the generally agreed upon best week for the National Cherry Blossom festival in DC. _Quiero hacer contigo lo que la primavera hace con los cerezos/I want to do with you what spring does with the cherry trees._ 😱
> 
> - _multum ille et terris iactatus et alto_ from the opening lines of the Aeneid. It's not the full line, hence the reference to meter... sry Vergil. Kinda squirrely to translate directly when isolated ([this man] having been tossed about a great deal both on land and by sea??) but for our purposes here the general intent boils down to 'thrown all over hell and creation'.
> 
> - _Screw your courage to the sticking place._...😏 okay no that was just me being tacky. apparently this has something to do with crossbow bolts? also, in context, murder. Shakespeare once again, Macbeth this time!


End file.
